bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/721647; this version posted August 1, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
Floral organs act as environmental filters and interact with pollinators to structure the yellow monkeyflower (Mimulus guttatus) floral microbiome.
María Rebolleda Gómez1 and Tia-Lynn Ashman
1Corresponding author: [email protected]
Affiliation: Department of Biological Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA 15260
Running title: Floral organ shapes monkeyflower microbiome
bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/721647; this version posted August 1, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
Abstract
Assembly of microbial communities is the result of neutral and selective processes. However, the
relative importance of these processes is still debated. Microbial communities of flowers, in
particular, have gained recent attention because of their potential impact to plant fitness and
plant-pollinator interactions. However, the role of selection and dispersal in the assembly of
these communities remains poorly understood. We evaluated the role of pollinator-mediated
dispersal on the contribution of neutral and selective processes in the assembly of floral
microbiomes of the yellow monkeyflower (Mimulus guttatus). We sampled floral organs from
flowers in the presence and absence of pollinators within five different serpentine seeps in CA
and obtained 16S amplicon data on the epiphytic bacterial communities. Consistent with strong
micro-environment selection within flowers we observed significant differences in community
composition across floral organs and only a small effect of geographic distance. Pollinator
exposure affected the contribution of environmental selection and depended on the rate and
“intimacy” of interactions with flower visitors. This study provides evidence of the importance
of dispersal and within-flower heterogeneity in shaping epiphytic bacterial communities of
flowers, and highlights the complex interplay between pollinator behavior, environmental
selection and additional abiotic factors in shaping the epiphytic bacterial communities of flowers.
Keywords: Microbiome; Pollination; Dispersal; Community assembly; Serpentine seeps;
Metacommunity; Mimulus guttatus; Anthosphere.
bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/721647; this version posted August 1, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
1 Introduction
2 Community assembly is the product of neutral and selective processes (Nemergut et al. 2013;
3 Vellend 2016). In particular, the composition of a community can change through speciation,
4 dispersal, ecological drift (or sampling of individuals and species over time), and environmental
5 selection (Vellend 2016). Environmental selection is a deterministic process and depends on
6 fitness differences between populations (Chesson 2000; Chase & Leibold 2003; Vellend 2016).
7 Neutral processes, in contrast, are independent of niche differences between species and are
8 predicted to be driven by stochastic differences in birth and death (Vellend 2016). Neutral
9 processes can lead to rapid differentiation of communities when dispersal between them is low
10 (McArthur & Wilson 1963; Hubell 2001; Economo & Keitt 2008). Dispersal, in turn, can be
11 deterministic or stochastic depending on species differences in dispersal abilities (Nemergut et
12 al. 2013; Lowe & McPeek, 2014; Evans et al. 2016). The relative importance of neutral and
13 selective processes in community assembly is still subject of much debate (e.g., Hubell 2001;
14 Tilman 2004; Leibold & McPeek 2006; Morrison-Whittle & Goodard 2015) and the contribution
15 of dispersal to these processes can be hard to measure in the field (Evans et al. 2016).
16 Understanding the relative contributions of these processes in host-associated microbiomes is an
17 important first step to understanding the consequences of microbe communities for the host
18 (Costello et al. 2012).
19 Studies of host associated microbiomes have highlighted the importance of selection by
20 the host in shaping its associated microbial communities (e.g., Rawls et al. 2006; Ofek-Lalzar et
21 al. 2014; Pratte et al. 2018). The host can favor colonization and growth of certain microbes over
22 other through diverse mechanisms like: immune system activity (e.g., Donaldson et al. 2018),
23 host secretions (e.g., Schluter & Foster 2012; Ofek-Lalzar et al. 2014), or specific environmental
1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/721647; this version posted August 1, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
24 characteristics like high osmolarity in flower nectar (Herrera et al. 2010). These effects,
25 however, can be overpowered by dispersal from other hosts or the host environment (Burns et al.
26 2017). Thus, understanding the relative contributions of drift (i.e., neutral) and selective
27 processes in the host can provide insight on the drivers of host-associated microbiome assembly,
28 their changes over time ( e.g. Burns et al. 2016), and the potential sources of these microbes (e.g.
29 Venkatamaran et al. 2015). Recently, flower-associated microbiomes have been established as an
30 excellent system to study community assembly and metacommunity dynamics (Belisle et al.
31 2012; Shade et al. 2013, Vannette & Fukami 2017; Chappell & Fukami 2018).
32 Flowers are multi-purpose reproductive structures and microbial communities of flowers
33 can have a large impact on plant fitness by directly affecting the survival and reproduction of the
34 plant (e.g., Alexander & Antonovics 1995), or through effects on pollination (Vannette et al.
35 2013; Herrera et al. 2013; Schaeffer et al. 2014; Schaeffer et al. 2017; Rering et al. 2017).
36 Understanding microbial community assembly in flowers, can highlight important, and
37 underappreciated, ecological processes affecting floral evolution and plant-pollinator
38 interactions.
39 Despite significant variation across floral organs, and potential effects of microbes of
40 anthers, pollen, styles and stigma on direct fitness effects (not mediated by pollinators), most
41 studies of microbial communities associated with flowers have concerned microbes of nectar
42 (e.g., Herrera et al. 2010; Belisle et al. 2012; Pozo et al. 2016; Mittelbach et al. 2016; Vannette
43 and Fukami 2017). These studies have shown the importance of pollinators in shaping some of
44 the assembly patterns of these microbiomes (Belisle et al. 2012; Herrera et al. 2013; Vannette
45 and Fukami 2017). But there is substantial variation in microbial composition that is not
46 explained by the presence/absence of pollinators (e.g. Vannette and Fukami 2017), and the
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47 source of most floral microbes remains unknown. Each floral organ is likely to create unique
48 conditions for the establishment of bacteria (Aleklett et al. 2014; Junker & Keller 2015).
49 Pollinators that transport microbes have different behaviors on flowers and could create varying
50 opportunities for contact with floral structures (Laverty & Plowright 1988; Russell et al. 2019).
51 Yet we have a poor understanding of the extent to which floral organs and their interaction with
52 pollinators creates heterogeneity in microbial communities within flowers.
53 In this paper we address the relative importance of neutral (i.e., drift and passive
54 dispersal) and selective processes (i.e., organs that create unique habitats within the flower), as
55 well as their interaction with pollinator-mediated dispersal in shaping epiphytic bacterial
56 communities in a flower with no nectar production. If neutral effects are the main factor
57 explaining community assembly, then we expect that: different organs will have a random
58 phylogenetic representation of the whole flower metacommunity and that the most abundant
59 microbes in the whole metacommuity will also be the most frequent in the different organ
60 samples. In addition, if communities geographically farther apart are less likely to share
61 microbial migrants, then, under a neutral model, we expect that these distant communities will be
62 more likely to diverge as a result of ecological drift (Hubell 2001; Soininen et al. 2007). Thus,
63 we would expect that spatial location of the plant in the habitat and not floral organ to explain
64 most of the differences between communities, and that community differentiation (beta diversity)
65 will increase with geographical distance. In contrast, if the different floral organs act as selective
66 microenvironments, then we expect that floral organ and not plant geographic location will be
67 the main determinant of community composition. In addition, if pollinators are the major agents
68 of microbial dispersal, then we would expect pollinator exclusion to affect differentiation among
69 locations or organs. Specifically, pollinators could homogenize communities by transporting
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70 microbes across large spatial scales, or they could increase differentiation by moving microbes
71 mainly within local patches. Finally, high rates of pollinator-mediated dispersal could
72 overwhelm the effects of local dynamics of environmental selection within the flower.
73 Materials and Methods
74 Study system and species
75 The yellow monkeyflower, Mimulus guttatus (Erythranthe guttata, Phyrmaceae) is self-
76 compatible, hermaphroditic and insect-pollinated annual/perennial herbaceous plant that is a
77 dominant component of the serpentine seep communities in northern California (Harrison et al.
78 2000; Freestone & Inouye 2006; Arceo-Gómez & Ashman 2011). Flowers are zygomorphic and
79 tubular, produce little or no nectar, and there is high variability among flowers in the quality of
80 the pollen rewards (Robertson et al. 1999; Wu et al 2008). In the field, monkeyflowers interact
81 with a variety of insect pollinators of varying behaviors and sizes (Arceo-Gomez & Ashman
82 2014; Koski et al. 2015). As a result, seep monkeyflower is highly generalized and well-
83 connected within the pollinator networks of these serpentine seeps (Koski et al. 2015).
84 Monkeyflowers were studied within five seep communities at the McLaughlin Natural
85 Reserve in northern California, USA (Table S1). These seeps are characterized by a high
86 diversity of flowering species restricted by abiotic factors (e.g., water availability) and are
87 separated in space by a grassland matrix. Therefore, seeps can act as discrete replicate
88 communities (Harrison et al. 2000; Arceo-Gómez and Ashman 2014).
89
90 Experimental set up and epiphytic bacterial sampling
91 At the height of flowering in 2017 (May 9-20) we established five transects along five serpentine
92 seeps with three (RH1, RHA and RHB) or four (TP9 and BNS) sampling points (Table S1; Fig.
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93 1A). Within each transect the locations of the sampling points provided a range of inter-seep
94 distances from ~10m to ~100m (Fig. 1B). The geographical position of the longest sampling
95 point within a seep was recorded as GPS coordinates (Table S1). For the shortest distances we
96 used the distances measured in the field. Using qGIS 2.18.10 (qGIS development team, 2016) we
97 projected all coordinates on WGS84/UTM Zone 10N to obtain a distance matrix in meters.
98 Within each seep and at each location, we set up paired control and pollinator-exclusion
99 cages (treatments). Cages were constructed from PVC and tulle (Joann Fabrics, ITEM #
100 1102979). The control cages had open sides to allow for visitation (Fig. 1C). Wearing sterile
101 gloves, we marked the petiole of several flower buds per plant within a cage with a permanent
102 marker. After marked flowers were open for 3-4 days we carefully dissected the organs of three
103 flowers from two to three different plants using sterile forceps. The stamens (anthers and
104 filaments), petals (only the corolla, without the calyx) and styles with stigma (no ovary) were
105 stored in separate sterile vials (Fig. 1D). To obtain enough DNA, for each sampling location-
106 treatment combination we pooled replicate organs from three different flowers, ending up with
107 one sample for each organ, for each treatment and location (102 samples of floral organs).
108 To get a better idea of the potential sources of floral microbes at each location we also
109 sampled a basal aerial leaf from each monkeyflower plant, soil (one random location per seep)
110 and flowers from the co-flowering community (39 samples total). The community samples were
111 a mix of five flowers representing the species in the local community (2 x 3m plot; Table S1).
112 All samples were collected at the same time (within a week of each other) to minimize changes
113 in co-flowering community, pollinator community and other environmental variables like
114 temperature.
115
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116 DNA extraction and 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing
117 To obtain the epiphytic bacterial communities of the flower organs (or leaves or flower
118 communities) we washed samples with 1ml of sterile phosphate buffered saline (PBS) and
119 vortexed them for ten minutes to detach bacterial cells from the tissue (in previous tests we did
120 not observe differences in colony forming units between five minutes of sonication with a small
121 jewelry sonicator and ten minutes of vigorous vortexing; data not shown). We concentrated the
122 microbial cells and used only the bottom 250µl of the pellet for DNA extraction (avoiding the
123 floral tissue). For our soil data we used 200 g of soil directly in our DNA extraction protocol.
124 We extracted DNA from all samples using DNeasy PowerSoil Kit (Quiagen). We added a
125 control for DNA extraction and sampling in the field (maintained a tube with 250µl of sterile
126 water opened in the field for ten minutes). Both of our controls failed to amplify. We sequenced
127 the 16S rRNA gene V4 hypervariable region using one run in the Illumina MiSeq platform
128 (Illumina, CA, USA). We used the 515FB-806RB primer pair
129 (FWD:GTGYCAGCMGCCGCGGTAA; REV:GGACTACNVGGGTWTCTAAT) and use
130 paired-end sequencing of 150 base pair per read (Caporaso et al. 2012). All of the sequencing
131 procedures including the library preparation, were performed at the Argonne National
132 Laboratory (Lemont, IL, USA) following the Earth Microbiome Project protocol
133 (http://www.earthmicrobiome.org/protocols-and-standards/16s/) with 12-bp barcodes. To reduce
134 chloroplast contamination, we used peptide nucleic acid (PNA) clamps (Lundberg et al. 2013).
135 All sequences will be made available in NCBI’s Short Read Archive.
136
137 Sequence processing
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138 We used PEAR v0.9.10 paired-end merging (Zhang et al. 2014). After sequencing we obtained a
139 total of 2.1 10ͫreads and we were able to successfully pair 1.9 10ͫ (92%). After merging
140 our reads, we re-assigned the barcodes to the merged reads with a custom script written by
141 Daniel Smith (https://www.dropbox.com/s/hk33ovypzmev938/fastq-barcode.pl?dl=1").
142 Subsequently, we demultiplexed our samples and removed low quality reads (Phred quality
143 scores < 20), aligned them with PyNAST (Caporaso et al. 2010), and assigned taxonomy (OTUs
144 at 97% similarity) with the RDP classifier (Wang et al., 2007), using the Greengenes database
145 (13_8 release), as implemented in QIIME v.1.9.1 (Caporaso et al. 2010b). We removed
146 mitochondria and chloroplast sequences as well as OTUs in low abundance (often spurious)
147 across samples (>0.0005% mean abundance) according to recommendations based on
148 simulations (Bokulich et al. 2012).
149 OTUs are a conservative measure of variation that clusters together sequences within
150 97% similarity. Sequencing errors often fall within that 3% of variation that is allowed within the
151 same OTU and are, thus, not interpreted as meaningful biological variation. However, OTU
152 clustering also losses much of the finer biological variation. DADA2 is a model-based approach
153 for correcting amplicon errors while maintaining sequence level variation (i.e., amplicon single
154 variants or ASVs; Callahan et al., 2016). To evaluate the robustness of our results, we also
155 processed our data following the DADA2 pipeline. After assessing the quality of our reads, we
156 trimmed the last ten base-pairs of our reverse reads but left our forward reads untouched to be
157 able to merge them. Most reads (1.32 10ͫ or 94%) were kept after quality filtering and
158 trimming.
159 After merging reads (we were able to merge 1.2 10ͫ of the filtered and trimmed reads,
160 92%), we removed chimeras and sequences either too short (less than 248bp) or too long (more
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161 than 256bp), and then, we removed chloroplast and mitochondrial sequences. Overall, results
162 from the QIIME 1.9 pipeline (OTUs) and DADA2 (ASVs) were consistent. However, DADA2’s
163 finer resolution tended to amplify stochastic variation between individual samples (see results
164 and discussion). Thus, in this paper we present the results from our OTU (QIIME 1.9 pipeline)
165 data and discuss when both analyses are discordant. Both pipelines are available in gitHub
166 (github.com/mrebolleda/OrganFilters_MimulusMicrobiome).
167
168 Pollination observations
169 To evaluate the effects of pollination intensity on the microbiome assembly, at each sampling
170 location we observed a similar number of flowers within a 2 x 3m plot and recorded floral
171 visitors for fifteen minutes. A visit was recorded as contact with a monkeyflower or a
172 ‘community’ flower in our plot (we did not count as separate visit multiple visits by the same
173 insect to the same flower, and we only counted the first three visits of the same insect, thus we
174 scored visitation at the plot level). We scored visits to focal monkeyflowers as ‘external’ when a
175 visitor contacted petals or ‘internal’ when an insect contacted anthers or stigma within the
176 flower. We classified each visit by the functional group of the insect following Koski et al.
177 (2015). Each sampling location was observed twice between 9:20 and 12:00, and twice between
178 12:00 and 16:00. For each location we calculated the visit rate to focal monkeyflowers and to the
179 community of flowering plants in each plot (visits/plot/hour).
180
181 Analyses of species composition
182 Due to evolutionary divergence in chloroplast sequences (Fitzpatrick et al. 2018), despite using
183 the PNA clamps ~80% of our reads were chloroplast and mitochondria sequences and were
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184 removed from analysis resulting in samples with anywhere from 211 to 179975 reads and a
185 median coverage of 5986 reads per sample (Fig. S1A-B). To facilitate accurate comparisons
186 across samples, we subsampled each to an even sequencing depth of 1200 reads. This number
187 was chosen as a balance between the depth of sampling within each bacterial community and the
188 number of communities (Fig. S1C-D). To minimize the potential effects of stochastic variation
189 due to low coverage, we obtained an average sample from each of our communities after 10,000
190 subsamples with replacement. In addition, we performed all of our analyses with data normalized
191 through a variance-stabilizing transformation as implemented in “DESeq2” (Anders & Huber
192 2010; Love et al. 2014). We obtained the same overall results with both analyses (data not
193 shown), however we present those using our rarefied community for diversity analyses because
194 the results were slightly more conservative. All statistical analyses were performed in R (3.4.4; R
195 Core Team 2017).
196 To characterize the epiphytic microbial communities of the monkeyflowers we calculated
197 four distance matrices using “Sørensen” (only richness), “Bray-Curtis” (relative abundance),
198 “Unweighted Unifrac” (relative abundance and phylogenetic distance) and “Weighted Unifrac”
199 (relative abundance and phylogenetic distance) (Lozupone & Knight 2005). These indices of
200 beta diversity allowed us to evaluate the robustness of our results as well as the importance of
201 relative abundances and phylogenetic information in our flower samples. We performed a
202 PERMANOVA to evaluate the effects of floral organ, pollinator treatment and seep for each of
203 the community distance matrices. We used the full model including as factors: floral organ, seep,
204 pollinator and the two-way interactions. We evaluated assumptions of homogeneity of group
205 dispersion using the function betadisper (Anderson 2006). Only Bray-Curtis showed
206 heterogeneity in the dispersion across organ samples.
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207 In addition, we evaluated the degree of phylogenetic clustering or overdispersion of
208 communities (from a particular floral organ and pollinator treatment) as the deviation from
209 expected phylogenetic diversity. To calculate phylogenetic diversity, we used the total branch
210 length of a given sample (Faith 1992) and the expected phylogenetic diversity was calculated
211 through binomial sampling of the whole metacommunity tree (O’Dwyer et al. 2012). In this case,
212 we defined our metacommunity as all of the monkeyflower samples together. Expected and
213 observed phylogenetic diversities were calculated using the picante package (1.7; Kembel et al.
214 2010).
215 Next, to evaluate the relationship between geographical distance and community
216 differentiation, we calculated bacterial community composition distance matrices using Bray-
217 Curtis and Unifrac for each floral organ within each pollinator treatment. We then performed
218 Mantel tests on these matrices using the “vegan” package (2.4-6; Oksanen et al. 2018). We
219 adjusted p-values to account for multiple testing using false discovery rate correction (Benjamini
220 & Hochberg 1995). We also assessed the degree of concordance between flower community
221 composition and microbial community composition at each location through Procrustes analysis
222 comparing a non-metric multidimensional scaling (NDMS) of data for each pollinator treatment
223 and organ combination.
224 Finally, to evaluate the uniqueness of each community we obtained a “core microbiome”.
225 Comparing overlap in “core” taxa only, provides a way to minimize inflation of non-shared taxa
226 by excluding OTUs that might be present only in a few samples. For this analysis we defined the
227 “core microbiome” as the OTUs that were shared by at least 20% of the samples of a given
228 organ/treatment (the maximum cut-off that still provided a large sample of more than a 100
229 OTUs). In other words, if an OTU was not present in at least 20% of the samples of a given
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230 organ in a given treatment then it was not considered part of the core for that organ and in that
231 treatment. With this list of OTUs we calculated overlap across organs.
232
233 Neutral model fit
234 To determine the potential importance of neutral processes to community assembly, we
235 evaluated the fit of a neutral model for prokaryotic communities (Sloan et al. 2006; Burns et al.,
236 2016). This model is based on the idea that, under neutral assumptions, taxa that are more
237 abundant in the whole metacommunity are more likely to occur in multiple patches (floral
238 samples). Thus, with a single free parameter m (that describes the migration rate) the model
239 predicts the relationship between the frequency to which taxa occur in a series of communities
240 (in this case each organ) and their abundance in the whole metacommunty (all of the
241 monkeyflower samples together).
242 Using the Akaike information criterion, the fit of this neutral model was compared to a
243 null-model (in this case a binomial distribution) that represents random sampling from the “pool
244 community” without drift or dispersal limitations (Sloan et al. 2007; Burns et al. 2016). The 95%
245 confidence intervals around the model were calculated by bootstrapping with 1000 samples.
246 OTUs within the 95% CI were considered to fit neutral expectations of distribution in the
247 metacommunity. OTUs outside the confidence intervals were separated in two categories:
248 overrepresented (present in more samples than would be predicted by their mean relative
249 abundance) and underrepresented (present in less samples than would be predicted by their mean
250 relative abundance). The relative proportions of OTUs in these different categories among floral
251 organs where evaluated with chi-square tests of independence with Bonferroni correction for
252 multiple tests.
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253 To determine the extent to which over- or underrepresented taxa are exclusive to each
254 organ (instead of shared across two or more of the floral structures), we generated a null model
255 to determine, given the number of OTUs in each category, how many would we expect to be
256 shared between at least two organs controlling for the number of OTUs (independently their
257 category). We repeated this sampling process 10,000 times to generate a null distribution for
258 comparison with our observed values. To determine the proportion of OTUs shared across our
259 organ samples we used the get.venn.partitions function in the “VennDiagram” package (1.6.20;
260 Chen & Boutros 2018).
261
262 Analyses of potential sources of monkeyflower microbial communities
263 To understand the relation between flower communities with other local communities of
264 microbes, we obtained the differences in OTU composition (beta diversity) between our focal
265 monkeyflower epiphytic microbial communities (for a given organ) and the communities acting
266 as potential sources (i.e., the rest of the floral organs, monkeyflower leaves, co-flowering
267 community or soil). We calculated total beta diversity and the components due to nestedness and
268 turnover (Baselga 2010) between the focal communities and the potential sources for each seep
269 using the R package “betapart” version 1.5.0 (Baselga & Orme 2012). A large contribution of
270 “nestedness” means that differences between communities are mostly due to subsample (species
271 losses) from the more diverse to the less diverse community. Whereas, a large contribution of
272 “turnover” indicates species replacement across communities (Baselga 2010). For each seep we
273 compared an average source community (to minimize variation due to differences in sample
274 sizes of sources) with all of the communities for a given floral organ in a given seep.
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275 To evaluate whether potential sources differed in their compositional distance to our focal
276 communities, and to investigate the contributions of nestedness and turnover to their overall beta
277 diversity, we performed an ANOVA with beta diversity as the response variable, and component
278 (nestedness or turnover), floral organ and source as factors. We did not include pollinator
279 treatment in this analysis because communities from both of our pollinator treatments showed
280 the same patterns (see results).
281 Beta diversity indicates differences between potential sources and our focal communities,
282 and the decomposition of beta diversity into nestedness and turnover components highlights the
283 ways in which those communities are different. However, to identify the likely sources of our
284 focal communities (and the uncertainty around these calls) we used SourceTracker as
285 implemented in R (version 1.0.1). SourceTracker is a Bayesian approach that models a sink
286 community as a mix of potential sources, allowing for assignment into an unknown source when
287 part of the sink (focal community) is not like any of the sources (Knights et al. 2011). The code
288 for all of the analyses is available in gitHub
289 (github.com/mrebolleda/OrganFilters_MimulusMicrobiome).
290
291 Results
292 Floral organs are the main factor explaining variation epiphytic bacteria community
293 composition
294 PERMANOVA results were fairly consistent across all beta diversity indices: pollination
295 treatment (exclusion/control), seep and floral organ and their two-way interactions explained
296 between 26% to 33% of the total variation in epiphytic bacteria of monkeyflowers (Table 1). In
297 general, our model was slightly better at explaining species composition alone (Sørensen and
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298 Unifrac) than abundance (Bray-Curtis and weighted Unifrac). The presence of OTUs (more than
299 their relative abundances) distinguishes between organs (Table 1; Fig. S2). Floral organ was
300 significant in its contribution to community composition across all the different distance metrics
301 (Fig. 2A, Table 1, Fig. S2), and alone explained between 4% and 11% of the variation (Table 1).
302 Seep was marginally significant (α=0.05) in all comparisons but Bray-Curtis (Table 1) and
303 pollinator treatment was not significant, but the interaction between pollinator treatment and
304 organ was marginally significant across indices (explaining ~3% of the variation; Table 1, Fig.
305 2A). Overall, floral organ was the only factor that was consistently significant, with seep and
306 interactions between factors being marginally significant in half or more of the analyses (Table
307 1).
308 Higher taxonomic resolution (using ASVs instead of OTUs; see methods) provides
309 additional support for organ as the main factor structuring microbial communities in flowers.
310 Using ASVs we might expect an increase contribution of stochastic and local processes (where
311 specific strains might only be locally distributed, or present in only a few samples). Despite this
312 increased stochasticity, organ is still significant across all diversity indices (Table S2). However,
313 seep and pollinator by organ interaction are no longer significant (Table S2).
314 Consistent with organs acting as environmental filters, microbiomes of a given organ in a
315 given treatment tended to have less phylogenetic diversity than expected from random sampling
316 of the whole floral bacterial metacommunity (Fig. 2B). Stamens and styles were dominated by
317 OTUs from the Pseudomonadales order, while the most abundant OTUs associated with petals
318 were more evenly distributed across the Pseudomonadales, Bacterioidales and Clostridiales (Fig.
319 S3).
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320 Despite evidence of flower organs contributing to community differences across
321 microbiome samples, we observed high variation across samples of the same organ (Fig. 2A, Fig.
322 S2, Fig. S3) and an exponential decrease in the number of OTUs shared by an increasing
323 percentage of samples of a given organ (Fig. S4A). Furthermore, a large majority of core
324 microbes were shared across organs, with no significant differences between the proportion of
325 shared vs. unique OTUs between pollinator treatments (Fishers exact test, p=0.225; Fig. 2C).
326 Among core microbes we found some of the most abundant genus in all organs: Acinetobacter,
327 Pseudomonas, Bacteroides and Corynebacterium. In addition, we found some common flower
328 associated genus like Erwinia and Lactobacillus as well as some unidentified Prevotella and
329 Streptococcus (more commonly associated with human hosts). Across both treatments, petals
330 had the largest number of unique OTUs even though we did not observe differences in alpha
331 diversity at our sampling effort (Fig. 2D).
332
333 Floral organs act as selective filters
334 We observed no significant relation between geographical distance at the measured spatial scales
335 (meters to kilometers) and beta diversity for petals, and styles, with or without pollinators.
336 Across treatments, communities displayed the same level of differentiation (beta diversity). Only
337 stamens showed increased community differentiation when exposed to pollinators than in the
338 control, and only the stamens exposed to pollinators showed a significant relation of increasing
339 beta diversity with increasing distance (Mantel test with 999 permutations, r=0.266, P=0.038)
340 (Fig. 3A). This relationship was similar to that seen in the leaf samples (Mantel test with 999
341 permutations, r=0.258, P=0.032; Fig 3A).
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342 Consistent with ecological selection across different floral organs, we found a large
343 proportion of OTUs that are either overrepresented or underrepresented under neutral
344 assumptions (Fig 3B). The neutral model only explains between 20% and 37% of the variation in
345 the distribution of taxa (Fig 3B), but it is a better fit than a model ignoring drift and migration
346 (Table S3). To assess deviations from neutrality across organs, we compared the proportion of
347 OTUs in each category (i.e., overrepresented, underrepresented and neutral) across the three
348 floral organs. We observed significant differences in the proportion of OTUs in each category
ͦ 349 across the three different organs ( ʚͨʛ 19.638, P= 0.0006). There was no difference between
ͦ 350 styles and stamens ( ʚͦʛ 0.551, P= 1), but petals had a higher proportion of overrepresented
ͦ ͦ 351 and underrepresented taxa than styles ( ʚͦʛ 15.344, P= 0.001) or stamens ( ʚͦʛ 11.327,
352 P= 0.01). In general, core taxa (present in at least 25% of samples from a given organ) were also
353 some of the most abundant (although this is not always true in the case of some overrepresented
354 taxa that are present in more than 25% of the samples despite having an overall low frequency,
355 and some of the underrepresented taxa, that are not present in even 25% of the samples, but
356 when they are they might be in high abundance; Fig 3B).
357 The neutral models perform worse when we separate the data by pollinator treatments
358 (i.e. exposed control and pollinator exclusion; Table S3). This reduction could be due to smaller
359 sample sizes. Nevertheless, the neutral models still explain between 15% and 26% in the
360 different treatments of stamens and styles, while these models explain less than 7% of the
361 variation in the distribution of taxa from petals (Table S3). For the most part, we did not observe
362 strong differences in the fit of neutral models when comparing our two pollinator treatments
363 (Table S3, Fig. S4). However, in the presence of pollinators the neutral model explained the data
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364 better than in our pollinator exclusion treatment (R2 Control= 0.15 vs. R2 Exclusion= 0.26 and
365 AIC Control= -79.5 vs. AIC Exclusion= -207.3; Table S3).
366 If each organ is selecting for a particular microbial community, we would expect that
367 over or underrepresented taxa for a particular organ will not be shared across different organs.
368 Whereas OTUs that are distributed according to a neutral model would be distributed more or
369 less randomly across the whole flower. According to our expectations, OTUs distributed
370 according to neutral expectations are shared across two or more organs in the same proportion as
371 we would expect by chance (Fig. 3C). Instead, over and underrepresented OTUs are shared
372 between organs more than we would expect by chance (Fig. 3C). This effect is stronger in the
373 control treatment; in the presence of pollinators over- and underrepresented taxa are more likely
374 to be shared among organs than when pollinators are excluded (Fig. S4).
375
376 Dispersal can overwhelm the effects of organ selection
377 Despite evidence of organ-specific selection on bacterial communities, we also observed a
378 marginally significant interaction between organ and pollinator treatment (although only in the
379 OTU data). In the pollinator exclusion treatment, almost twice as much of the total variation is
380 explained by floral organ, relative to the control (Fig. 4A). This is true even in the ASV data set,
381 where, organ explains more variation in the pollinator exclusion treatment than in the control
382 (except in the case of Bray-Curtis; Figure S5). In addition, floral organs of pollinator excluded
383 plants have a larger proportion of unique OTUs across a variety of cut-off values for the core
384 microbiome (0-60%; Fig. S4B).
385 Pollinator service was heterogeneous in both quality and quantity. Some insects mainly
386 encountered the external parts of M. guttatus, whereas others contacted the internal reproductive
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387 organs of the flower. The community of ‘external’ visitor insects differed significantly in
388 composition from the community of insects visiting the ‘internal’ parts of the flower (Fishers
389 exact test, p>0.0001; Fig 4B). In addition, visitation varied in rate across location with visitation
390 to the yellow monkeyflowers varying from 6-55 mean visits/plot/hour (Table S1). We observed
391 no significant correlations between the total number of visitors (internal and external) and the
392 pairwise beta diversity between petal samples of the pollinator exclusion and the control
393 treatment. In contrast, when we consider only internal visitors (those that might be in direct
394 contact with anthers and stamens) we observed a positive correlation for the stamens (increasing
395 in strength as we account for abundance and phylogenetic information in the beta diversity index
396 used; Fig 4C). This pattern is maintained when looking at the ASV data. In contrast, there are no
397 clear patterns for petals and styles, and all significant correlations (styles using Bray-Curtis and
398 petals using Unifrac; Figure 4C) are lost when analyzing the ASV data (Fig S7).
399 We did not observe a clear association between the co-flowering community composition
400 and microbial community composition for none of the organ/pollinator treatment combinations
401 (Table S4). Alpha diversity was not correlated with pollinator visitation rates, co-flowering
402 community abundance nor co-flowering community diversity (Fig S8).
403
404
405 Potential sources of floral microbes
406 Our results suggest that pollinator-mediated dispersal of microbes can affect community
407 assembly and possibly override the contribution of environmental selection from different floral
408 organs. But the ultimate sources of microbial communities of flowers remain unclear. Using
409 decompositions of betadiversity, we can ask how much organ-specific communities differ from
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410 other microbial communities that could act as sources (i.e., soil, M. guttattus leaves,
411 heterospecific co-flowering neighbors or remaining parts of the M. guttattus flower) and how
412 much of these differences is due to replacement of OTUs (turnover) or loss of OTUs in a nested
413 manner from the potential sources (or more diverse communities). Levels of beta diversity were
414 high across all comparisons (0.77±0.012 SE), indicating differentiation of our focal bacterial
415 communities from all other potential sources. Across floral structures beta diversity was highest
416 when focal organ-specific communities were compared with soil and lowest in comparison with
417 the neighboring heterospecific flowering community. Surprisingly, these patterns of
418 differentiation from potential sources, were not different across pollinator treatments (Fig. 5).
419 The contributions of nestedness and turnover were significantly different (ANOVA,
420 F(1,84)=13.037, p= 0.0005) and their contributions varied across sources (ANOVA,
421 F(3,84)=237.618, p<0.0001) but not across floral organs (ANOVA, F(2,84)=1.758, p=0.1787; Fig.
422 5; Table S3). Comparisons between the focal floral organ and the remaining flower organs had
423 the highest values of nestedness and lowest values of turnover than comparisons with all other
424 potential sources. Soil, instead had the lowest values of nestedness, and the highest turnover (Fig.
425 5). This analysis suggests that the OTUs in our focal communities are (to some extent) a subset
426 of those present in other flowers in the co-flowering community, and have a number of OTUs
427 not present (or present in low abundance) in our soil samples.
428 Consistent with these results, using a Bayesian approach to track the potential sources of
429 microbes (Knights et al. 2011), a large proportion of our sample was assigned to be from the co-
430 flowering community (neighbors) and only a small percentage from soil and leaves. All groups
431 (organ and treatment) had a large proportion of bacterial taxa that was assigned to unknown
432 sources, with a larger contribution in the petals.
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433
434 Discussion
435 Despite their importance for plant community function and fitness, we know very little about the
436 communities of microbes that inhabit flowers. Here we showed that different organs within a
437 flower have different epiphytic bacterial communities which overwhelm the effects of
438 geographic distance on community composition. Our results indicate that bacterial communities
439 of flowers are established by the balance of dispersal and environmental selection, but this
440 balance will be different for each organ within a flower. We suggest that floral organs (especially
441 the petals) act as environmental filters and that, in the absence of pollinators, the metacommunity
442 as a whole might be better described within a species-sorting paradigm that emphasizes niche
443 differences (Leibold et al. 2004). However, our data suggest that, within organ environmental
444 selection could become overwhelmed by pollinator-mediated dispersal of new taxa (especially in
445 organs with extensive pollinator engagement like the stamens) and, with high rates of visitation
446 the metacommunity might be better described through a mass-effect perspective, were
447 metacommunity dynamics are mostly determined by dispersal (Leibold et al. 2004).
448
449 Environmental selection
450 Consistent with previous studies of floral microbiomes, we found that flowers of the yellow
451 monkeyflower (M. guttatus) have microbial communities that are distinct from other plant
452 organs (Fig. S6; Junker et al. 2011; Ottesen et al. 2013; Junker & Keller 2015; Wei & Ashman
453 2018). We provide evidence that floral organs act as different environmental habitats
454 contributing to the assembly of flower microbiomes, despite the small size of M. guttatus
455 flowers, and the close contact between stamens and styles with the petals. These results confirm
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456 predictions based on knowledge of chemical and morphological differences of these floral parts
457 (Aleklett et al. 2014; Junker & Keller 2015). Specifically, 1) floral organ explains more of the
458 variation in community assembly than seep or pollination treatment, 2) OTUs within a particular
459 flower organ are more phylogenetically clustered than expected by random, and 3) most
460 differences in community composition do not correlate with distance at the scale of this study.
461 Moreover, a neutral model fails to explain the patterns of distribution of a large proportion of
462 OTUs within the flower. Thus, our results corroborate previous work showing that floral organs
463 support different microbial communities (Junker & Keller 2015) and that flower
464 microenvironments (i.e., nectar) can act as strong environmental filters (Herrera et al. 2010) but
465 also extend them by separating the effect of different organs and measuring the effect of
466 dispersal on the effectiveness of organ selection.
467 We found that a large proportion of OTUs were shared among two or more organs (more
468 than expected by chance for OTUs that deviate from a neutral expectation) and that differences
469 in epiphytic bacterial community composition across organs could be accounted by the
470 nestedeness component of beta diversity. These observations suggest that each organ
471 microbiome is a subset of monkeyflower metacommunity and that, potentially, each organ filter
472 acts in a (more or less) sequential manner. Within the flower, we hypothesize that petals act as
473 the first environmental filter. Petal microbial communities had the highest proportion of unique
474 taxa and showed the strongest signals of selection (i.e., they had a larger proportion of over and
475 underrepresented taxa; Fig. 3B). While some bacteria taxa might be enriched in the flowers, were
476 they are able to grow on floral volatiles and other carbon compounds (Abanda-Nkpwatt et al.,
477 2006), it is likely that the strongest selection is to get rid of potential pathogens and other
478 microbes with potentially negative effects on the plant fitness. Monkeyflower petals have a
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479 much larger area than stigmas or stamens and are exposed to a larger proportion of microbes
480 coming from neighboring flowers, transferred by bees, or moved passively from the soil and
481 other organs of the plant. However, once on the petals, microbes could be filtered by petal traits
482 (like pigments, volatiles, trichomes and epidermal cell shapes) that can affect antibiotic
483 properties, surface water retention and temperature of the flower (Whitney et al. 2011; Harrap et
484 al. 2017; Cisowska et al. 2011; Huang et al. 2011). From the petals microbes could colonize the
485 style and stamens. In the case of the style at least, the presence of pollinators increases the rates
486 of microbe colonization from the petals: style communities in the control (open to pollinators)
487 treatment tend to be more similar to petal communities and share more OTUs than those in the
488 pollination exclusion treatment (Fig. 2A; Fig. 2C).
489
490 Dispersal
491 While it is often assumed that pollinators play a key role in dispersal of microbial communities,
492 and some systems bear this out (e.g. yeast nectar communities; Pozo et al. 2014; Vannette &
493 Fukami 2017), insects visiting flowers have diverse interactions with organs within a flower
494 (Plowright & Laverty 1984). In this study, pollinator treatment on its own did not account for
495 differences in community composition, but rather affected the importance of organ selection in
496 explaining differences in community composition across samples. A similar study looking at
497 community composition of microbiomes of whole tomato flowers found no differences between
498 pollinator exclusion and their control treatments but found increased variation across flower
499 microbiomes in the control (pollinators allowed) relative to flowers in the absence of pollinators
500 (Allard et al. 2018). Here we show that the magnitude of the effect depends on the floral organ as
501 well as the rate and type of interaction with pollinators.
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502 The interplay of dispersal and environmental selection has been hard to disentangle in the
503 field (Evans et al. 2017). Here, we showed that differences in visitation rate of insects to yellow
504 monkeyflower explained some of the variation in treatment differences among locations for the
505 stamen samples. However, the intimacy of the interaction also played a role. Some of these
506 visitors were butterflies and flies that rarely contacted internal organs of the flowers (Fig. 4B),
507 while others had more extensive internal contact with the floral organs. Indeed, the bacterial
508 communities of stamens and styles showed the largest differences between pollination treatments
509 and, in particular, the bacterial communities in the styles had a larger proportion of unique OTUs
510 in the exclusion treatment relative to the control.
511 Mimulus guttatus flowers in the field are mostly visited by medium and large bees
512 foraging for pollen (Robertson et al. 1999; Wu et al. 2008; Arceo-Gómez et al. 2018). Thus,
513 pollinators are likely to have sustained engagement with the stamens and alter the microbial
514 environment of these organs by removing pollen. In a recent paper, Russell et al. (2019) showed
515 that in flowers of M. guttaus scrabbling (one of the common behaviors to forage pollen in bees)
516 results in a larger deposition of microbes than other behaviors, and in artificial flowers this
517 behavior leads to the largest deposition of bacteria on the stamen. Here, we showed that
518 differences in bacterial community composition in the stamens across pollinator treatments
519 increased with increased pollination rates. This correlation was clearer when we considered
520 abundance and phylogenetic distance in our analysis. These results are consistent with our
521 observation that, in the absence of pollinators, phylogenetic diversity of the bacterial
522 communities of stamens is much lower than in the presence of pollinators. Finally, the bacterial
523 communities of the stamens in the presence of pollinators are more consistent with a neutral
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524 pattern than in our exclusion treatment, and consistent with a contribution of local dispersal,
525 bacterial communities in the anthers became more differentiated with increased distance.
526 Overall, in this system, petals seem to be acting as a major environmental filter where
527 only a few bacterial taxa can establish and, while a few new bacteria might colonize at high rates
528 of visitation, many of these taxa will remain in low abundance, unable to establish as part of the
529 main petal community. Instead, pollinator engagement with the stamens can introduce variation
530 in the communities and outweigh some of the contributions of environmental selection.
531 One caveat however, is that amplicon studies can underestimate the effect of organ
532 selection because it is not possible to distinguish dormant species, which can represent a large
533 proportion of microbial communities (Jones and Lennon 2010; Lennon and Jones 2011).
534 Dormancy can facilitate dispersal (Locey 2010) and minimize the experienced environmental
535 stressors (Jones and Lennon 2010) potentially obscuring signals of organ level selection. With
536 the exception of some nectar yeasts and bacteria, and some floral pathogens, we do not know the
537 extent to which microbes are actively growing in flowers. Of the orders we observed in high
538 abundance, many (e.g., Bacillales, Clostridiales, Actinomycetales) are characterized by taxa with
539 spores or other forms of dormancy (e.g., Paredes-Sabja et al. 2011). Future studies should
540 address the proportion of dormant cells in different organs of the flower, the relative contribution
541 of pollinators to that dormant pool as well as the functional roles of microbes in different parts of
542 the flower.
543 Furthermore, we did not see a signal of community differentiation by distance (except in
544 the stamens of the control treatment), and while one might be tempted to conclude that microbes
545 are “everywhere”, it might instead reflect limited resolution of 16S sequences within the spatial
546 scales chosen in this study. The small sizes of microbes could mean different spatial scales at
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547 which environmental selection and dispersal shape local communities. On the one hand, small
548 cells mean that even within a single organ within the plant, microbes might be experiencing
549 many different environments (Lindow & Brandl 2003). The strongest signal of niche sorting
550 might occur at the sub-organ scales. On the other hand, because of their small size dispersal of
551 some microbes might occur at much larger scales than the ones considered in this project
552 (Wilkinson et al. 2012; Choudoir et al. 2018).
553 Differentiation by distance alone is not the best indicator of neutrality because different
554 patterns of dispersal will result in different patterns of spatial differentiation of communities (e.g.
555 pollinators might travel only a few meters or more than a kilometer in a single dispersal event;
556 Castilla et al. 2017) and locations separated by distance might also experience slightly different
557 environments. This might also be why we did not observe a relationship between the co-
558 flowering community at each site and the microbial communities in the flowers of M. guttatus in
559 those same sites. In this study we tried to minimize these effects by having the small and medium
560 length distances replicated along different environments and directions (Fig. 1A, B) and by using
561 different lines of evidence to asses neutrality (see Environmental Selection section).
562 While this study provides explicit measurements of neutral and selective contributions of
563 microbial communities of flowers in the presence and absence of pollinators, it also highlights
564 that most of the variation in community composition of floral microbiomes remains unexplained.
565 Factors outside the flower (including soil chemistry) could affect the local pool of microbes or
566 even the floral chemistry (Majetic et al. 2008; Meindl et al. 2014). Similarly, variation across
567 flowers, across plants, or even within a single plant due to competition and strong priority effects
568 (e.g. Peay et al. 2012) could be contributing to the unexplained effects and unfortunately, much
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569 of that variation is obscured in this study because to obtain enough DNA we had to pool together
570 the organs of three different flowers from the same cage for each sample.
571 Here we have shown the importance of “intimacy” and rate of pollination for microbial
572 dispersal in different organs. However, consistent with recent results (Allard et al. 2018), we
573 have also shown that floral communities have a similar composition in the presence or absence
574 of pollinators indicating the importance of other mechanisms of microbial dispersal in shaping
575 floral colonization (e.g., wind, soil and rain). These unknown sources (wind, water, florivores,
576 nectar robbers, other nearby flowers) all could have contributed to the large proportion of OTUs
577 that we were unable to assign to a known source.
578 Unfortunately, another source of unknown microbes that can play a role (especially for
579 small samples like some of the ones used in this study) is contamination during sampling,
580 extraction and sequencing. While is possible that we had some contamination (it is common in
581 low biomass microbiome analyses; Eisenhofer et al. 2018) we were unable to amplify any of our
582 controls, and to minimize the effects of minor contaminants, we randomized our samples and
583 used sterile equipment at every stage of the process. Similarly, while contamination could
584 explain the presence of some human associated taxa, it could also due to imperfect taxonomy
585 assignment that depends what is already in the database. Additionally, it could be that the species
586 present (which were not able to identify) can be found in flowers. While most of what we know
587 of Streptoccocus comes from human pathogens, this genus has also been found in the aerial
588 surfaces of plants (e.g. Pontonino et al., 2018).
589 Finally, the best practices in analyzing microbiome data are still subject of much debate
590 (e.g. Callahan et al. 2017; Pollock et al. 2018). In this study we analyzed the data in multiple
591 ways (standardizing libraries vs. rarefying data; using OTUs vs. error learning ASV assignment;
26 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/721647; this version posted August 1, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
592 see methods) and in most cases the method did not affect the results, and in the cases in which it
593 often provided different levels of resolution and different information (same when varying
594 diversity indices). In some cases, these multiple analyses provided added confidence in the
595 results (e.g. community differences between organs). Whereas in other cases (e.g. the
596 relationships between visitation rates and pairwise beta diversity in petal and style samples)
597 discrepancies between analyses suggest caution is warranted.
598 This study advances our understanding of community assembly of flower microbiomes. It
599 highlights the interplay between dispersal and environmental selection, providing insight into
600 potential effects of pollinator disturbance or floral changes on microbial community
601 composition. As the reproductive structure of angiosperms, microbial effects on flowers can
602 have a large impact on plant fitness. From previous studies we know that microbes of flowers
603 can modify volatile production and nectar composition affecting pollinator visitation (e.g.
604 Herrera et al. 2008; Rering et al. 2017). In addition, the flower is the main site of infection of
605 important pathogens of plants (e.g. anther smut, Erwinia amylovora) and microbial communities
606 of flowers can affect the probability of infection (e.g. Pseudomonas fluorescens growth on
607 significantly reduces the establishment of Erwinia; Wilson and Lindow, 1992).
608 Despite its importance, the flower remains a relatively understudied environment for
609 microbes and there is still much we do not know. Future studies should address the effects of
610 different floral traits and floral heterogeneity in the assembly of microbial communities, the
611 importance of these microbes to plant fitness and the effects of microbial community assembly
612 on plant communities and the evolution of plant traits. A better understanding of the processes
613 affecting community assembly of flower-associated microbiomes provides insight into the
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614 processes driving flower-microbe-pollinator interactions and the potential effects of different
615 disturbances and environmental changes in changing these dynamics.
616
617
618 Aknowledgments
619 We are grateful with R. Hayes for field assistance and with P. Aigner and C. Koehler for the
620 facilities provided at the McLaughlin Natural Reserve. Instructors at the EDAMAME workshop,
621 A. Johnson and C. Marshall all provided helpful advice for the analyses. Members of the
622 Ashman lab provided useful feedback at different parts during this project. Feedback from two
623 anonymous reviewers greatly improved this manuscript. This work was supported by the
624 National Science Foundation (DEB 1452386 to T-L. Ashman). M. Rebolleda-Gómez was
625 supported by the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences through a Pittsburgh Ecology and
626 Evolution Postdoctoral fellowship.
627
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Data availability: DNA sequences will be made available through NCBI’s Short Read Archive,
all other data will be deposited on Dryad. R code for analyses is available on GitHub at
github.com/mrebolleda/OrganFilters_MimulusMicrobiome
Authorship: MRG and TLA designed the research. MRG conducted observations, sampling and
analyses. MRG wrote the manuscript with substantial input from TLA.
* certified bypeerreview)istheauthor/funder,whohasgrantedbioRxivalicensetodisplaypreprintinperpetuity.Itmadeavailableunder bioRxiv preprint
Table 1. Table with PERMANOVA summaries using different betadiversity indices (Org- Floral organ; Pol- Pollinator doi:
Sorensen Bray-Curtis Unifrac Weighted Unifrac https://doi.org/10.1101/721647
Df F R2 p F R2 p F R2 p F R2 p
Floral organ (Org) 2 3.364 0.068 0.001 1.993 0.042 0.001 5.543 0.107 0.001 1.913 0.039 0.016
Pollinator (Pol) 1 1.273 0.013 0.143 1.085 0.011 0.289 1.299 0.013 0.142 1.313 0.014 0.206 ; Seep 4 1.326 0.054 0.020 1.157 0.049 0.113 1.396 0.054 0.024 1.532 0.063 0.022 a this versionpostedAugust1,2019. CC-BY-ND 4.0Internationallicense
Org*Pol 2 1.451 0.03 0.033 1.359 0.029 0.040 1.557 0.03 0.019 1.63 0.034 0.038 . treatment). The copyrightholderforthispreprint(whichwasnot
* certified bypeerreview)istheauthor/funder,whohasgrantedbioRxivalicensetodisplaypreprintinperpetuity.Itmadeavailableunder bioRxiv preprint
Org*Seep 8 1.03 0.084 0.347 1.122 0.095 0.113 1.161 0.09 0.077 1.128 0.093 0.204
Pol*Seep 4 0.96 0.039 0.614 0.886 0.037 0.800 0.846 0.033 0.832 0.837 0.035 0.722 doi:
Residuals 70 0.712 0.737 0.675 0.722 https://doi.org/10.1101/721647
; a
this versionpostedAugust1,2019. CC-BY-ND 4.0Internationallicense . The copyrightholderforthispreprint(whichwasnot
* bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/721647; this version posted August 1, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
Figure 1. Experimental design. A. Map of seeps at McLaughlin Natural Reserve and sampling locations within them. The different colors indicate each seep. B. Diagram of sampling locations within each seep. Distances between sampling location as 10-100m. C. Picture of pollinator exclusion cage and control cage in one of the locations. D. Diagram of Mimulus gutattus flower showing the floral organs studied: petals (pink), the four stamens (yellow) and the style (turquoise). A. Seep Elevation 0 500 1000 m BNS 0 - 325 TP9 325 - 488 RH1 488 - 651 RHA > 651 RHB
Lake
Yolo
Napa
B.
TP9 RH1 RHA RHB BNS
C. D.
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Figure 2. Contribution of floral organ differences to bacterial community structure of monkeyflowers (Mimulus guttatus). A. PCoA based on Unifrac differences between samples. Each point represents one sample. B. Bacterial communities of each organ are phylogenetically clustered (i.e., lower phylogenetic diversity than expected). C. Venn diagrams of the core microbiome of each floral organ for each of the pollinator treatments. D. Alpha diversity across floral organs. Small circles represent each sample and the large circles the mean values. A. B. 2 Pollinator treatment 0.2 Exclusion Control
0.1 0 Floral organ Petals Stamens 0.0 Style -2 PCoA2 (8%) PCoA2 -0.1
-0.2 -4 Phylogenetic diversity (estandarized effect) (estandarized diversity Phylogenetic -0.2 0.0 0.2 PCoA1(17%) C. D.
3 Exclusion Control Style Style 3 7 13 13 7 2 34 Petals 5 27 741 Petals 3 36 22 5 1 Stamens Stamens (Shannon) diversity Alpha
Petals Stamens Style
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Figure 3. Effect of pollinator treatment in beta diversity across floral organs of Mimulus guttatus. A. Beta diversity calculated in a multivariate space from Bray-Curtis distances. B. Relationship between geographical distance and betadiversity (Bray-Curtis) across different floral structures and leaves. C. Proportion of OTUs that are shared across at least two floral organs. The distribution is the result of 1000 simulations assuming no differences between groups other than their sizes. The vertical dashed line indicates the observed values. Control A. Pollinator exclusion 1.0
0.8
0.6
0.4 Beta diversity (Bray-Curtis) diversity Beta
Stamens Petals Style Leaf 012012012012 Distance (km) B. 100 Style Overrepresented Stamens Petals Underrepresented e 2 2 2 g R =0.37 R =0.20 R =0.34 Neutral a t n
e 75 c r e p 50 e c n e r r
u 25 c O 0 -12 -8 -4 -12 -8 -4 -12 -8 -4 log(mean relative abundance)
C. Overrepresented Underrepresented Neutral 1.00
0.50 Frequency
(null distribution) (null 0.00 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 Proportion of OTUs shared across at least two floral organs
* bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/721647; this version posted August 1, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
Figure 4. Pollinator effect on community composition. A. Percentage variation in community composition explained by organ in the control and pollinator exclusion treatments. B. Composition of pollinator pool (percentage of total number of visits) contacting external or internal surfaces of the flower (Functional pollinator categories from Koski et al., 2015: XS- extra-large social bees; LS- Large social bees; SB- small solitary bee; MB- medium solitary bee; LB- large solitary bee (pollen on body); LL- large solitary bee (pollen on legs); BF- bee fly; SF- small syrphid fly; LF- large syrphid fly; FL- other flies; LE- moths and butterflies; BE- beetles; VE- wasps; OT- other). C. Correlations between visitation rate to the plots and community composition differences between pollinator treatments at each location (pairwise beta diversity- see small insert). Colors show the strength of the correlation and the numbers inside denote the p- values after adjustment for multiple testing (see text for details). Analyses were performed using different beta diversity indices. Sørensen (Sor) and Unifrac (Uni) include only presence-absence data whereas Bray-Curtis (B-C) and weighted Unifrac (W-Uni) also account for relative abundances. A. B. Exclusion 100 XS Control LS SB MB 15 75 LB LL 12 50 BF SF 9 LF Percentage FL 25 LE 6 BE VE 0 OT SorB-C Uni W-Uni
% Variation explained by "organ" External Internal Beta diversity index
C. All visits Internal r 0.8 0.6 0.56 0.65 0.65 0.001 0.26 0.26 0.4 0.2 0.65 0.65 0.72 0.05 0.06 0.51 0.0 Abundance B-C W-Uni
0.65 0.65 0.21 0.18 0.77 0.04 Uni Beta diversity index diversity Beta
Presence 0.65 0.65 0.65 0.22 0.18 0.18 Sor
Pairwise beta diversity beta Pairwise 01020 Stamens Style Petals Stamens Style Petals Visitation rate (visits per plot/hr)
* bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/721647; this version posted August 1, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
Figure 5. Potential sources of microbial communities in M. guttatus flowers. A-C. Components of beta diversity comparing potential source microbial communities (rest of the M. guttatus flower, M. guttatus leaves, floral neighbors, soil) against the communities of stamens, petals and styles (in columns). A. Total beta diversity as measured by the Sørensen index. B. Portion of beta diversity that is due to turnover of species. C. Component of beta diversity that is due to nestedness. Points are the mean ± one standard deviation. Solid circles are samples from the control treatment and solid circles are from the pollinator exclusion treatment. D. Proportion of OTUs in each treatment that could be assigned to each source using Bayesian estimation. The rest of the flower was not added as a potential source in this analysis.
* bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/721647; this version posted August 1, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
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